The Islamic University of Gaza

Department of Civil Engineering

Design of Special Reinforced Concrete Structures

Design of Piles Cap

Dr. Mohammed Arafa 1

Piles Cap Design
 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Design and give complete detailing of the pile cap that
constitutes a part of deep foundations system.
The design data are as follows:

Column dimensions 60cm×120cm

Service column load 700 ton
Factored column load 1050 ton
Pile diameter 80cm
Pile working load 135 ton
fc 300kg/cm2
fy 3600 kg/cm2
 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Step 1 : Determine Dimension of Pile Cap
Service Load of Column 1.05 700 1.05
Number of Piles    5.44
Pile Working Load 135

Choose 6 Piles
 The factor 1.05 It takes into consideration the pile cap own weight.
 The spacing between piles usually taken (2.5Ø to 3Ø) i.e. in this
example use spacing of 2.0 m
 The distance from the centerline of the pile to the edge is taken (0.8Ø to
1Ø) Use 0.8 m
 The pile cap depth is assumed to be 1.40 m
 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Own weight of pile cap (Service) = 2.5 x 5.6 x 3.6 x 1.40 = 70.56 ton

Service column load  own weight of pile cap

Actual Pile load 
number of piles

700  70.56
  128.43 cm < 135 ok
6
 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Step 2 : Check for Shear
One way shear
Factored load of column  Factored O.W of pile cap
Factored Load of pile 
6
1050  1.2  70.56
Factored load of pile   189.11 ton
6
d  140  7 1  132 cm

The critical section is at d from the column face as shown in the following
figure
 Section 1-1

The pile load should be reduced depending on the location of the critical
section pile Width at critical section  48  0.60
pile diameter 80

Factored reduced pile = 0.60x189.11 = 113.47 ton

 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Vu = 2 Reduced pile load - O.W of pile cap at critical section (hatched)

V u  2 113.47 - 1.2  0.88  3.6 1.4  2.5  213.63 ton

Vc  0.75  0.53  fc '  b  d

Vc  0.75  0.53  300  360 132 /1000  327.17 ton  Vu ok

The section is considered adequate

Section 2-2

Vu = O.W of pile cap at critical section (hatched)

V u 1.2  0.18  5.6 1.4  2.5  4.23 ton

Vc  0.75  0.53  fc '  b  d
Vc  0.75  0.53  300  560 132 /1000  508.93 ton  Vu ok
 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Two way shear (Punching shear)

The critical section is at d/2 from the column face as shown in the
figure
a1  c1  d  120  132  252  2.52 m
b1  c2 2  d  60  132  192  1.92 m
U  2(a1  b2 )  2  2.52  1.92   8.88 m
The punching load equals to the column load + own weight of pile
cap in punching area minus the parts of the piles loads located in
the punching area
36
Reduced Farctored load of pile  189.11  85.10 ton
80
Vu = P column + O.W of pile cap within area – 2 x reduced pile load

Vu  1050  (1.2 1.92  2.52 1.4  2.5)  2  85.1  890.92 ton

The concrete strength for the punching is the least of

2
Vc  0.75  0.53  (1  )  300  888 132 /1000  1614.04 ton  Vu ok
2
 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Check Punching shear for individual pile

Pile Load = 189.11 ton

U = 3.48 m from figure

Vu = pile load – O.W Pile cap

Vu= 189.11-(3.04x1.4x2.5x1.2)
Vu= 176.34 ton

Vc  0.75  0.53  (1  0)  300  348 132 /1000  316.26 ton  Vu ok

 Example (Design of Pile Cap )
Traditional Method
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Step 3 : Design for Flexural
the critical section for flexural is at the face of the column
there are two critical sections
Section 1
Mu = Moment of the (2 piles) - Moment due to O.W of hatched pile cap
Section 1
2.22
M u  (2 189.111.4 )  (1.2  3.6 1.4  2.5   566.1 ton
2
0.85 f c'  2.61  10 5 M u 
ρ  1 - 1 - 2 ' 
f y  bd f c 
ρ   min So use As min
= 0.0028

As min  0.0033  360 132  156.82 cm 2

As /m = 156.82/3.6 =43.56
use 9Ø25 mm / m
Section 2
Mu = Moment of (3 piles ) - moment due to O.W of hatched pile cap
Section 2
1.52
M u  (3 189.11 0.7)  (1.2  5.6 1.4  2.5   423.59 ton
2

0.85 f c'  2.61  10 5 M u 

ρ  1 - 1 - 2 ' 
fy  bd f c 
ρ   min So use As min
= 0.0018

As min  0.0033  560 132  243.94 cm 2

As /m = 243.94/5.6 =43.56
use 9Ø25 mm / m
 HW Problem
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Design and give complete detailing of the pile cap that
constitutes a part of deep foundations system. (Using two
piles configurations)
The design data are as follows:

Column Diameter 100 cm

Service column load 200 ton
Factored column load 290 ton
Pile diameter 50cm
Pile working load 60 ton
fc 300kg/cm2
fy 4200 kg/cm2